Energy policy is not a subject that one might expect to be captivating, but I found the book fascinating. Partly this comes from working at a Department of Energy lab, and partly from my growing interest in how socio-economic modeling can yield insights into climate change responses. However, above all, as Vito comments, "energy policy is Shakespearean, with heros and villians, although often not clear which is which." An unlikely statement, perhaps, but true.

October 23, 2007

The data are fun, but I'm not convinced. Certainly the Google Trends data
captures the fact that "virtualization" has replaced "grid computing" as the most
popular industry buzzword. But given that industry has used "grid computing" mostly
to mean "cluster computing" (e.g., Oracle 10-G, SGE), that doesn't say too much
about grid per se.

Measuring adoption and impact is nevertheless
an important goal. Thus we have integrated usage reporting mechanisms
into our Globus software. We see continued growth in use, as captured
by metrics such as service deployments. We're now trying to understand
the underlying usage modalities. We believe that many are concerned with
"eResearch" functions other than "federating computers"--e.g.,
on-demand access to computing [on HPC systems and/or EC2], data
distribution, service publication and composition, etc. Do these
functions count as "grid"? They do according to our article "The
Anatomy of the Grid"--and if you look at the goals of projects such as
D-Grid.

It would be interesting to see Google Trends data for just "grid." However, that word alone has too many different uses.

October 22, 2007

I recently came across the speech given by Fred Brooks (author of The Mythical Man Month and other wonderful works) on receiving the ACM Allen Newell Award in 1996. In this speech, titled "The Computer Scientist as Toolsmith," he says many interesting things. I'll quote a couple. First, he writes that "computer science" is above all an engineering discipline, concerned with "systems design problems characterized by arbitrary complexity":

Examples are the intricate demands upon operating systems, or knowledge webs, or computer networks. The arbitrariness is inherent—the requirements and constraints spring from a host of independent minds.

These problems scandalize and discourage those who approach them from backgrounds of mathematics and natural science, and for different reasons. Mathematicians are scandalized by the complexity—they like problems which can be simply formulated and readily abstracted, however difficult the solution. The four-color problem is a perfect example.

Physicists or biologists, on the other hand, are scandalized by the arbitrariness. Complexity is no stranger to them. The deeper the physicists dig, the more subtle and complex the structure of the “elementary” particles they find. But they keep digging, in full faith that the natural world is not arbitrary, that there is a unified and consistent underlying law if they can but find it.

No such assurance comforts the computer scientist. Arbitrary complexity is our lot, and here more than anywhere else we need the best minds of our discipline fashioning more powerful attacks on such problems.

It's a useful reminder that "computer science" is not [just] mathematics or physics, and that there are many challenging things to be done in computing that do not involve theorems or physical laws.

Second, he challenges what he saw as the goals of AI research to replace human intelligence:

If indeed our objective is to build computer systems that solve very challenging problems, my thesis is that IA > AIthat is, that intelligence amplifying systems can, at any given level of available systems technology, beat AI systems. That is, a machine and a mind can beat a mind-imitating machine working by itself.

Someday a computer may beat the world champion in chess. When that day comes, I should like to see the world champion equipped with a powerful and suitable IA chess tool, and then play against the AI system. I’ll bet on the IA team.

October 18, 2007

An article on iSGTW describes the National Institutes of Health's cancer biomedical information grids (caBIG) project and its caGrid infrastructure. Not too much new information relative to previous posts, but a good reminder of the nice work that this group is doing. The event that spurred this article is the recent release of caGrid 1.1.

From a technology perspective, caBIG and caGrid are exciting because of the extensive and powerful use they make of the Web Services infrastructure developed over the past several years. In particular, I can't resist pointing out that the entire infrastructure is based on Globus software, and in particular its implementation of the WSRF, WS-Notification, WS-Addressing, security, and related specifications.

October 17, 2007

The dev.globus open source grid software community continues
to expand with the formation of another Incubator, RAVI: Remote Application
Virtualization Infrastructure.RAVI leverages the Introduce
system to provide GUI-based tools to guide a user through the process of
identifying an application, mapping from strongly typed Web Services operations
to application arguments, defining authentication and authorization
requirements, and deploying a service onto an execution site. (RAVI, by the way, was the name I suggested humorously for
this project originally proposed by Ravi Madduri. He tried to change it to
RAVE, but that was already
taken.)

This brings the total of active dev.globus projects up to twenty-five.
Information on all twenty-five can be found at http://dev.globus.org/wiki/Welcome.
(If you're interested in starting a project, please contact
incubator-committers [at] globus.org.)

Meanwhile, Jennifer Schopf has completed her term as chair of the dev.globus Incubator
Management Project (IMP). During her tenure, the dev.globus community has
expanded considerably: we owe her a big thanks for her outstanding and tireless work.

Charles Bacon has kindly agreed to step into the IMP Chair
role. We wish him the very best for his tenure.

October 16, 2007

A belated note of congratulations to our GridWay colleagues at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. (A dev.globus incubator.) Their demo entitled "GridWay Interfaces for on-Demand Access to EGEE"
won the "Best Demo Prize" at the EGEE'07 Conference. The demo showed the
several interfaces provided by GridWay to port applications:

OGF DRMAA standard support (C, JAVA, Ruby, Perl and Python bindings)

LRM-like CLI

From a cluster to the Grid (SGE Transfer Queues)

GridGateWay (WS-GRAM interface to a whole grid infrastructure),
which allows end user to access a meta-scheduling instance using Globus
commands

I also note that they just announced a new stable release (5.2.3) of the GridWay metascheduler.

October 15, 2007

Exciting news from NASA. As Kennedy would have said: "We choose to [install Wi-Fi] in this decade and do the other things, not
because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal
will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills,
because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are
unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others,
too."

October 13, 2007

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

A perhaps underappreciated aspect of this award is that (as I have noted previously)
the climate model simulation data that underpinned the IPCC analysis
was made available to the international community via the Earth System Grid, which itself uses (among other things) Globus software. Thus the Grid and Globus communities could (if they were less modest) claim a tiny little bit of credit for that prize.

The next phase of IPCC will require the analysis of far more
data than in the current round, as models become yet more sophisticated
and more scenarios are run. The next phase of Earth System Grid will
feature a more decentralized, federated structure to enable this
analysis.